Dominic Awotwe Bassaw

Thank you for your loan. It has been disbursed to Dominic Awotwe Bassaw by Christian Rural Aid Network (CRAN) in Ghana. We are excited to watch this business grow. Over the 7 months of this loan, Christian Rural Aid Network (CRAN) will be collecting repayments from this entrepreneur and posting progress updates on the Kiva website.

Dominic has an electronic repairs shop, and he also sells electronic parts in the coastal fishing town where he lives. Dominic lives with his wife, three daughters, a younger brother and his mother in the family home. He and his wife, who is a seamstress, are financially responsible for all of them since Dominic’s father became very ill and had to be hospitalized last year. Though Dominic initially took out this loan, his second, from Christian Rural Aid Network (CRAN) to expand his inventory, he in fact, ended up using the loan to pay for those hospital bills. The loan money did not even cover the bills, and Dominic went further into debt by borrowing from friends to meet those bills. Unfortunately, Dominic’s father’s condition worsened, and he passed away.

Now, as you can imagine, Dominic is struggling to make his loan payments. With Dominic’s first loan from CRAN, he was able to buy some powerful speakers which he rents out, in large part, to weddings, funerals, engagement parties and even to charismatic churches which use them to broadcast their all-night revival sessions to the community. These rentals, along with the profits from his repair service and parts sales, go to make loan payments, and to support the expenses of his entire household, including the school fees of his daughters. His younger brother completed senior high school last year, and will be continuing his education in a college next year. Dominic will also be responsible for paying for those fees. Because of these recent challenges, Dominic could not pay the fees for the school that his daughters were attending. He had to move them to another, cheaper school where the education is of a lesser quality. He attributes his ability to manage his finances through all these hard times to good planning. Dominic said to me, “It is difficult, and some days it is miraculous that I am able to feed my family.”

I find it amazing that Dominic has been able to manage as well as he has with so little. And despite all the obstacles before him, Dominic holds onto the hope that he will one day be so successful at his business that he will be able to build a home on the land that he already owns. Sometimes, microloans in themselves cannot improve someone’s life, and larger forces win out temporarily in the battle to reduce poverty. For now, Dominic is struggling, and all of us at Kiva and CRAN share the hope that this, too, shall pass, and that prosperity will return to Dominic and his family in the near future.

About Christian Rural Aid Network:

Christian Rural Aid Network is a non-governmental, rural development organization established in 1993 with the aim of promoting an improvement in the quality of life and the socio-economic development of the rural poor in Ghana. Based in Cape Coast and operating in three regions and seven different districts, CRAN’s work is based on the values of Christian motivation and obligation towards the development of the individual as a whole, employing and promoting “demand-led” or “self-help” strategies for community development and rural poverty reduction. CRAN’s mission is to “work towards the improvement in the quality of life of the rural poor, the disadvantaged and the marginalized populations and communities in a holistic fashion (physically, socially, economically and spiritually), with emphasis on the right of children to quality formal education, in addition to the economic and social empowerment of women in a professional and qualitative manner”. To learn more about CRAN, click here. To browse through profiles of recent CRAN loan applicants and to make a loan to another worthy CRAN loan client, click here.